The project that I bought that perfect skein for on Saturday? I finished it today.

I’d spent a fair amount of time charting out the idea in my head so that the mental image and the stitch counts would come out right. Nope not that, try again, till I had just the thing and so it would come out just the right size, too.

I cast on yesterday morning to get right to it. Did the outer border area, started in on the color work.

And stopped.

I had forgotten to break off a second section of Perfect Skein so that I’d have strands from both side edges to work from. Either I was going to have to break it and have extra ends to work in on a piece that it was important to have stay flat, or rip the whole thing out and start over, or–

–bag that, let’s just see where this takes me because I was suddenly curious, and I continued with color #2 and made it entirely up as I went along and then I just kept going with that while having no idea whether I was going to do graduated colors above or just these or what and knit knit knit knit knit knit knit knit knit knit

till this afternoon I declared it done. Ran the ends in. Blocked it. LOVED it. No visual connection to the original idea. I would never have planned what it came out to be but I’m so glad it did: it is just the thing.

Now to get it dry and mailed and received so I can do more than offer vague descriptions of all this.

But I am really really happy with it, especially because I know the recipient will be, too.

And to the good folks at Areaneacraftstudio, this is all your fault because nobody else had that most-perfect skein but at 5:45 pm Saturday during the Bay Area Yarn Crawl, you did. Thank you!

There is someone I seldom see and whom I’d like to be better friends with, but where my hearing has gotten in the way as much as anything and we just haven’t made much of a connection.

She is a woman of faith but not of our particular flavor of it, although her husband is.

So I was surprised and delighted to find she’d been asked to give a Palm Sunday reading from scripture of the passion of the Christ to us. And she’d said yes.

She found herself stopping mid-verse a moment to wipe a tear quickly out of the way, and I think I did, too.

After the meeting she happened to be just on the other side of a door I was walking through. I stopped when I saw her, unable to find the right words to convey the power of what she’d offered us all, and simply said, Thank you, as we held each other’s eyes in our own.

Everything felt transformed right then and there for the better. She had no words, just joy, and finally gave a pat on my arm, nodding.

Love. It is all there truly is.

The Bay Area Yarn Crawl continued, and so did we today: Nina and I got to five yarn stores, three of which I had not known existed before we started getting ads telling us about this DIY Stitches on the part of the local shops.

There were poofy white clouds against bright blue skies and it seemed like every time we got out of the car we’d get this little burst of rain on our heads and it would stop while we were in the stores: we were little strings the cloud-cats were playing with. But since there was just enough water to tease, not to soak, it got pretty funny.

We had so much fun! There were other people following the same order of stores at the same time that we kept running into.

We snacked on homemade blueberry orange and raspberry orange muffins.

It was 5:35. There was a store I had scratched off my list because they also sold fabric, and in my experience the sewing stores have almost no yarns so why bother? But it was between us and home without going much out of the way at all and Nina headed for it because why not? We should be able to beat the closing this time.

There. At the eighth yarn store. There in that shop that sold fabric too and only there was the exact shade of the exact yarn that I’d wanted this whole time for a particular project I had not cast on all week because I just didn’t have what I wanted for it (and boy had I looked) and it had been dyed exactly the way I wanted it, heathered but with no splashes of black like so many of those have and I would be more specific but then it would spoil a surprise so never mind. I came out of there telling my old friend Thank you thank you thank you! for taking me there.

What you can’t see in this picture is that the wall past that mannequin on the left is solid yarn–and we’re talking the good stuff. Malabrigo. Woolfolk. Which I’d told Nina she had to come feel this.

She’d never heard of Woolfolk. Oooooooh!!! Five hunter green skeins came home with her, along with two skeins of the Malabrigo Rios that I had picked out one of–we can be each other’s backup plan.

That shop was for both of us the biggest purchase out of the whole two Saturdays’ worth of expeditions.

That’ll teach me.

At last we got home, got the menfolk, and took them out to dinner, and I am sitting here typing way too late, marveling at how much living got packed into ten short hours in one single stretched-taffee of a day.

No cancer. Future risk estimated at 5 point something percent. Come back in a year.

Cool.

Meantime, I stepped outside this evening with rain about to start, suddenly thinking there might be few petals left tomorrow and wanting not to miss fully appreciating them.

I checked their patient portal again and the radiologist still hasn’t entered anything.

On the other hand, neither did the phone ring today with anyone wanting to tell me bad news personally, so that’s good. See how patient I’m being?

And on a lighter note, Alexandra Petri at the Washington Post noted that Fox News had prayers for sale.

(Now, in my church, poems are wonderful but a prayer is a heartfelt conversation between you and God, not something you might recite out of a book, and the work of being an actual Christian is in putting oneself aside and trying to hear/feel/fathom/choose/enter verb of your choice/ the guidance of the actual Divine for the good that it leads to. But I digress.)

So with capitalism sponsoring religion, Petri offered up a few of her own, and I’ll borrow a few of her lines here because she is just so good at this:

Our Father Who –sponsored by 23&Me

Art in Heaven–sponsored by Etsy

(and then eventually you get to)

On earth as it is in heaven –sponsored by Boeing

and

Forgive us our debts –sponsored by, I don’t even have to tell you because you’re already laughing and E. Jean Carroll gets first dibs.

Yeah…

I always figure if a doctor is running late it’s because someone really needed their time and got it and I’m all for that.

Still, I teased her: I finished my knitting project. I’ve never done that before. I had to read my phone like normal people!

She chuckled.

You were out on maternity leave. Your little one must be–kindergarten?

She loved that I remembered: He’s in first grade.

So is one of my grandsons!

Okay, so with that bit of reconnecting after that long gap we sat down and talked bone densities.

I had been wondering why I needed to wait months for a new-patient visit when I hardly considered myself such, but in fact she spent an hour being very thorough, checking every possible med for possible interactions with my new meds since the last time I saw her, every trajectory on this osteoporosis history.

Turns out that what they’ve learned since I had Prolia infusions eleven years ago is that if you stop taking it the bones regress to where you were before you started. Oh. There was good reason to stop it at the time, but now it’s time to try something new, so we are.

I fell Sunday (fairly spectacularly, with multiple people running for me and half the crowded room suddenly frozen–I was not trying to be that good at it) and twice more last night. She was wondering if I remembered her saying to always try to catch yourself in a fall because hand bones heal much faster than hips and I told her, I remembered that and I was really good, I did exactly that! I broke my finger in two places the next day!

I didn’t need to be quite that compliant, like, this was not an encouragement to go throwing myself around.

I know…

Sudden side note to myself: now, while I’m thinking about it, I need to quick go figure out a new carry-around project and put it in my purse because it is out of knitting and there’s that mammogram in the morning.

Anybody else play Hellowordl to warm up for Wordl? Y’know, where there’s no once-a-day limit? Great word retrieval brain exercise.

I also find it a pun incubator. As in:

Equip: to send a joke to a comedian online.

But then you get to the real Wordl, and today’s bot helpfully suggested I could have chosen its word for my next guess.

It stumped me. That is the last place I expect to see a word I’ve never heard of. My heavy Merriam Webster on the floor was raising its hand excitedly, going, *I* know, *I* know!

Talus. (Flipflipflip.) Refers to where the slope of a hill suggests gold underneath. (What the hey, Wordl?) Current usage is more, the rock debris at the bottom of a cliff and especially a slope caused by such, and definition two, the bone that bears the weight of the body and with the other leg bone forms the ankle joint. Or just call it the entire ankle.

Wait. Seems to me if you’re talking anatomy, which seems a pretty specific and medical category, you don’t want to be throwing meanings at the wall to see where they stick or go splat.

(Equip. That one’s for you, Dad, I can hear you laughing up there from here.)

Well that was fast. Mammogram Thursday morning first thing. All I had to do was ask–and then show up then, of course.

One of the women in the carpool last night said something and I did a double take and went, Wait–did YOU have breast cancer, too?!

Yes, last year.

She told me how her doctor had told her she was officially old enough not to have to have mammograms anymore and her response had been, Why don’t we have one last one for old time’s sake. Which made me kind of laugh, because that isn’t a test one associates with fondness nor nostalgia.

But that is why they caught it quite early.

I thought she’d just been watching church by Zoom. I thought she’d just gotten a shorter haircut than usual. I had had no idea.

I’m going, I’m going!

My cellphone rang. I was in my knitting group Zoom and ignored it, noticing though that it went on and on. I finally silenced it–noticing a tenth of a second too late whose name was showing. The landline immediately rang. I picked it up and said, Hi, Phyl!

She was heading out to watch a women’s broadcast at the church the next town over and suddenly had the thought that she should offer me a ride since I don’t drive at night. I did a quick goodbye to my fellow Zoomies, who were almost done anyway, and waited for her car.

I realized only after the meeting had started that the less-local people had not thought to enable the captions on the video part of the meeting because why would they ever need to, nor was there a Zoom link for it. But they did have the sound turned way high.

Booming, echoing, painfully loud radio static in that room. It made me wonder how anybody with normal ears could make any sense out of that.

The evening was rescued by the two friends who had carpooled with me. It was the generosity, the conversations in the car, the time spent in person that made me glad after all that I’d gone.

The one thing that if only, if only I could have changed, was the news they gave me that a mutual friend went to the doctor a few weeks ago about the increasingly bad back pain she was having for no reason that she knew of–but it turned to be widely metastasized breast cancer. She is now in palliative care. She’s younger than I am. I just cannot imagine the him without the her in that couple, but it’s coming.

I will schedule my overdue mammogram first thing in the morning.

With Stitches gone, the yarn stores set up a week-long Bay Area Yarn Crawl, and I understand a lot of other areas are holding them, too. You print out your Bingo card, you have each store stamp their name in their little box on your card (Nina printed out three out of curiosity and they were all different) and there are goodies. People get out of their ruts, run into old friends (we did) and discover new stores and help them out a little bit.

It’s the closest the shops can come to setting up a Stitches conference on their own.

It would not have been something I would have paid much attention to–it is safe to say I do not currently lack for yarn.

Nina didn’t need any either, but what she did see was an excuse for us to spend a day doing something we would both enjoy. And man did we ever!

She wanted to start off with Fengari’s in Half Moon Bay. I hesitated, remembering tourist-town yarn prices, but caved quickly as I reminisced about how, when Holz and Stein, makers of the best knitting needles I’ve ever found, made from the leftover wood from making musical instruments, announced that they were ceasing to export from Germany anymore–shops everywhere sold out of them quickly as people stocked up.

But a year or two later, it turned out, Fengari’s still had some.

In a back room, not as well lit, and you had to know and you had to ask. I don’t remember who tipped me off. It took me two trips to the coast to talk myself into spending what it was going to cost, but good tools last a lifetime and I treasure every pair. I bought about twenty.

My favorites were rosewoods, several varieties of which were now on the CITES endangered list, and that may well have been part of H&S’s calculus.

A knitting needle speakeasy. (I kid. It was remaining stock.)

So! We were at Fengari’s, a good twenty years later, and I asked if they had any, still, shaking my head and declaring it an obvious no because, hey.

And they said, We don’t–but actually, Royal Bee up the coast might well.

Royal Bee was next on our list anyway.

They actually had some: three pairs. In size 7 and 7.5 mm. Not US sizes, millimeters. In US sizes that would be like 10 3/4 and 10 7/8 and there isn’t quite a Harry Potter train station reference in there but there ought to be.

Nina likewise had declared them the best needles there are and took a pair home even in that size because you take what you can get.

We drove up the coast from there, reveling in the ocean to our left and the beautiful countryside to our right. The tunnel! That was on my bucket list! I told her. When Devil’s Slide collapsed into the ocean again and Caltrans got tired of making bridges and then watching them go poof, they finally after years of arguing bored under the mountain so that the wildlife corridor could continue above.

I had wanted to see that view (the Mavericks surfing spot!) and then that tunnel for years: not enough to make the drive over just for that, because it seemed silly, but I’d wanted to anyway. And now we had! Score! And she got to, too! It was silly and it was wonderful and we had a glorious time of it.

At the end of the day I’d bought: that pair of needles and a jar of fig ginger chutney at Royal Bee. Who goes to yarn stores to buy bespoke chutney, but for $12 I could be curious once.

So, needles. A jar of jam-ishness. And a single, vivid, colorful skein of Malabrigio Rios.

From Fengari.

And after the bridge alongside the long narrow Crystal Springs Reservoir (N-Are you looking for the Flintstone House? Me-I always do! N-My husband always does too!), then a few minutes later wending through Stanford’s greening hills of Spring rising above the roadway as we neared home, I looked up at the small wild oaks dotted here and there rising to the tops above and told Nina I suddenly realized for the first time where some of the inspiration for this afghan might also have come from.

And I would never have realized it had we not just spent the day we had.

Terrible nighttime photo but it’s getting there, it’s getting there!

Still haven’t decided if I’m going to embroider green moss on the rocks.

The only trees that don’t have purple flowers between them are the ones I was doing while running a fever and just simply didn’t think of it while pushing myself to get something productive done. So they mark their own little placemaker in time, to the reality of the making, and I find I’m okay with that.

Y’know… When I put the ribbing on the other three sides, I could double the number of stitches on the first navy row at the top, put every other one on a lifeline, knit the ribbing in the usual number to twice the length and then fold it over and cast it off with the waiting stitches. A three-needle-bindoff or some such.

That way (insert rod) you could have a (pet proof) wallwarmer as well as a couch warmer.

Nah….

They are the thinnest- and easiest-peeling mandarins there are, with no seeds and very nearly no whites.

The critters had been leaving my Kishu tree alone–till last night. So with about a pound and a half left of those very small mandarins (this was its first real harvest), I picked every one.

I knew there was an orange almond cake recipe out there that was very good but I didn’t remember where I’d found it.

Given the size, I wanted a recipe that didn’t just say throw a seedless orange in a blender–I wanted a measurement. I wanted weight. I went looking till I found it, and the fact that the author specifically says don’t throw in extra just because you have it made it easy to figure out that she’d played with this enough to know what she was talking about.

After it went in the oven I did my usual bowl scrapings onto a small plate and into the microwave for twenty seconds to get an idea of the taste and texture this was going to turn into.

Definitely what my Kishus had wanted to be when they grew up.

Fruit, almond flour, eggs, sugar, baking powder. No butter.

I have about five ounces of leftover mandarin puree to experiment with later.

Even my timer wanted it to hurry up: I set it for fifty minutes and it heard fifteen. Not so fast!

Update: it was very good. But next time I’ll put a parchment round on the bottom of the pan.

Last night was, at long last, the final dose of antibiotics.

It had been two months since this whole eyebrow/the tumor is benign/raging infection thing started; all this time I’ve been avoiding the potential exposure of–who knows what, since it’s not like they’re cutting eyebrows, but don’t ask about logic.

I ran for the haircut I’d been waiting for for so long.

I’m a child of the ’60s and ’70s, I like long hair. But I lost a chunk of mine to skin cancer years ago and it gets awfully thin on the right past a certain point, while what’s left tends to get caught in things when it gets too long. Like the car door when you shut it. I fear the KitchenAid mixer after a relative described her teacher’s long hair getting caught and ripped out by the beaters on hers, and when your hands are gooped in batter is a lousy time to go oh right and try to put it back in a braid.

An old friend who hadn’t seen me in awhile marveled last week, “Your hair is so long!”

And now (sorry/not sorry) it’s not. Just below the shoulders and we’re good. And it is.

Today:

1. Enjoy the sunflower sprouts.

2. Be glad the twice-a-month gardener day turned out to be the day after the neighbors’ guy pruned their stuff and saved labor by dumping it all on my baby peach tree on our side of the fence and leaving it. Debate telling the neighbor, who would surely never know otherwise. She’s about 90. I offered my guy a bonus for the extra time spent and he just waved me away with a chuckle: it happens. The peach tree only lost a branch or two, thankfully. (Not that it had very many in the first place.) It will have extra sunlight for a couple of months, so that’s good.

3. Get a visit from Richard’s sister who flew in this afternoon to see the California relatives, take her out to dinner, have a fine time, take pictures (not posting her picture). Wish for better lighting, resolve to finally fix that entryway one that blew in the power failure.

4. Find slightly more sympathy for the neighbor’s gardener. But not a whole lot. (Honey, you got the entryway, the edge of the living room and family room, the kitchen, and the top of the dining room table.)

5. Be glad it fell after he stepped far enough away from it that none of it hit him.

If you want instant gratification, fourteen out of the eighteen sunflower seeds I planted Thursday afternoon were growing and greening by the hour this morning.

This evening, there on the other side of the tray were the first two of the Park’s Junior Whopper tomatoes.

It’s like they’re trying to encourage me to plant a bigger garden this year or something.